Marcella Hazan comfort food

Julia Child certainly pioneered gourmet cooking for our generation, breaking down the complex dishes into easy steps. But Marcella Hazan injected the fun of simple, easy Italian dishes into the equation with The Classic Italian Cook Book, and nowadays it is her recipes we go back to while it's rare that we still do Julia's.

Two perennials that we do every year at least once, though rarely on the same weekend as we did this year, are the pork loin braised in milk and the sauce bolognese. Both dishes apparently come from Bologna, the capital of Emilio-Romagna, generally considered the epicenter of Italian cuisine. Both combine meat and milk in a very un-kosher fashion. Both are incredibly simple and delicious.

For the pork, you take a 2 lb. tied roast, brown it in 2 Tbl. each of butter and oil, salt and pepper, add 2-1/2 c. milk and let it cook for 1-1/2 to 2 hours, turning the pork occasionally and basting it. Add more milk if necessary. When pork is tender, remove and drain fat from pot, add some water and boil quickly to loosen cooking bits. Slice the pork and drizzle the pan juice and brown milk curds over the slices. For the first time, I actually followed Marcella's suggested accompaniment of fried artichoke wedges and they were terrific with the pork.

The sauce bolognese is almost as easy. You soften 2 Tbl chopped onion in 3 Tbl each of butter and oil, add 2 Tbl each of chopped celery and chopped carrot and cook gently for 2 min. Add 3/4 lb. ground beef, breaking it up and cooking over medium heat only to color it. Marcella makes a point in her head not of how important it is not to brown the meat, so that it can get sweet and velvety in the subsequent stewing. She calls for 1 tsp. salt in with the meat but we find that too much and reduce it to 1/2 tsp. Then add 1 c. white wine and cook over medium high heat until evaporated. Then 1/2 c. milk and cook over medium until evaporated. Then 2 c. canned Italian tomatoes, roughly chopped, with their juice. When the tomatoes start to bubble, turn down heat to simmer for 3, 4, or even 5 hours.

Often I do a double portion and freeze some, but since it is already spring I just did the recipe portion (which she optimistically lists as 6 portions). Every time we have it we agree we should have it more often.